choose yourself first

to be alive is to risk rejection.

i’ve been dating a bit more actively recently, and something i’ve noticed in myself is this fear of rejection. while it’s obviously a very normal human feeling, i’ve realized that i’ve actually spent a great deal of my life trying to avoid rejection altogether.

and not just in dating. actually, dating has just been the cherry on top, helping me to see how this fear has been humming in the background of my life this whole time. how we do one thing is how we do everything…

so the question has been: do i actually like this person, or do i just want to feel chosen?

we can apply this question to any area of our lives that involves a relationship — whether it be with a job, a friend, a community, a stranger, etc etc.

we all want to feel chosen. that feeling when someone you like, also likes you back is intoxicating. but it’s fleeting, and we know it. so we try to manipulate everything we can to get them to stay liking us. to get them to keep choosing us. but there’s no end in that. our happiness then depends on whether or not the other person continues to choose us. and if they stop, we crumble. this is why we must choose ourselves first. we must continue to choose ourselves over and over and over again relentlessly. choose yourself first as the love of your own life.

and what’s so bad about rejection anyways? i’ve been learning that the fear is not even about the rejection itself. it’s about the fear of feeling the rejection. next time you fear you’re going to be rejected (or have already been rejected), see what happens when you fully accept, welcome, and embrace the feeling of rejection somatically. allow this feeling to express completely in your body. you may be surprised to discover that the resistance actually dissolves and there is a sort of heart-opening expansion that happens within you.

we avoid rejection because we don’t want to feel the pain. i get it — we’ve all been trained to see pain as bad. to avoid it at all costs. but what if pain is not the same thing as suffering? what if we saw our discomfort, our pain as simply a sensation that wants to move through the body? what if we saw it as a sign of our humanity, rather than an indication that something is wrong with us?

to live fully is to open yourself up to rejection. and i think that’s a beautiful thing. rejection is choosing to engage fully with life. it’s choosing to be an active participant, rather than a bystander on your journey. rejection means you are human. rejection is your humanity. your art. your real, raw beauty. and why else are we here but to throw ourselves into this beautiful, blissful, uncomfortable experience of being human?

xo